Category Archives: recipes

When I returned from my trip to Hebden Bridge I pitched straight into completing the first full draft of my new book, on food resilience. I’ve been working on this book for some years, piecing the content together from field trips, networking events and out-takes from the Resilience Handbook. Cultivating my own resilience garden supplied me with the vegetables’ point of view!

I’ve been living on experiments for months, as I calculate exact quantities for recipes I’ve used for decades without measuring. Food resilience combines rotating your emergency stores with whatever you can forage – your own produce, special deals, community orchard fruit. This has kept me so busy that I just don’t use the supermarket any more, except to replenish heavy items in my stores.

You can’t make just a little marmalade!

I find I become quite obsessive at this stage of writing. Once I get past 40,000 words, I encounter continuity issues, even with non-fiction. Did I write on that subject in a previous chapter? Or did I just pencil in some notes? Finally weaving all the threads of a book into a single narrative requires intense concentration on my part.

The knotted rug pictured in ‘Diary, September 2014’ finally completed this winter

As I rewrote the ‘Table of Contents’ ready to create a master document, and reach my personal milestone – the first word count of a full manuscript – I had that indefinable feeling that it was finished. There’s still a lot of work to do – chapters to revise, recipes to refine – but the book suddenly felt whole. I can take the scaffolding away; it’ll stand up on its own!

After over a month of relentless concentration, I can relax back into my normal writing regime. The book still requires work, but not to the exclusion of all else. Spring is coming, the new Resilience Allotment is prepared for planting, new adventures await!

The Resilience Allotment

Apologies to my followers for the long hiatus! I do appreciate you, and the whole blogging community. I learn marvellous things from these windows you open into other places and lifestyles – I hope I’m giving you food for thought.

The links on this site are selected to provide stepping stones to further knowledge. Inform yourselves through many sources, and fake news will stand out like the wrong piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Autumn is the prime time for eating potatoes. They’re a good crop for the novice gardener as they’re such a user-friendly vegetable. I got a good yield this year from the tyre stacks; the harvest has kept me supplied since August! Pick out the blemished or nibbled spuds and eat them first, keeping the good ones in a cool dark place for later.

I always cook more than I need for one meal and use the leftovers next day. Twice baked potatoes, shepherd’s pie or fried potato cakes are my usual recipes of choice, but I thought I’d give potato scones a whirl this time.

You need a griddle to cook them on. This is a thick, flat metal sheet, about the size of a frying pan. It’s a useful piece of kit; people often used griddles to make pan breads over an open fire when we were living off-grid at long events. You can use them on a gas cooker, but I haven’t tried with an electric ring. Experiment; I expect it’ll work.

I haven’t got a griddle, so I used the heavy Le Creuset frying pan which is so perfect for pancakes; that worked just fine! Although their kit is fiendishly expensive, I’ve used this pan constantly for twenty years and it’s probably good for the same again.

This recipe is for eight ounces of mashed potatoes. Weigh your leftovers and adjust the amounts accordingly. Don’t mash butter in if you plan to make these; serve them for the initial meal with the butter dotted on top, or the quantities will be wrong.

8 ounces mashed potato

1 ounce butter

2 ounces self-raising flour

dash of salt

Mix the flour and salt into the mash. Rub in the butter to make a stiff dough. It might seem a bit dry at first, but will soon soften as the butter warms up, so don’t add liquid. Knead this lightly, roll it out to about a centimetre thick on a well-floured board. Cut into triangles and cook for five minutes each side on a hot greased griddle or suitable equivalent.

I’d eat these with beans and bacon, but the kids from the Gardening Group preferred to spread them with golden syrup – this was surprisingly tasty, if rather sticky!

This recipe made eight scones at a total cost of thirty pence, using organic locally sourced butter and flour. Read the Food section of ‘The Resilience Handbook – How to survive in the 21st century’ to get started on low cost living!

I eat from stores, supplemented with my own produce – it’s not even a big garden, nor does it take much effort. I only venture into supermarkets to stock up on heavy stuff and bargains; I feel almost deprived of retail experience! However, I’m off to explore Iceland next week thanks to the money I’ve saved, so I can live with it!

Most of these special seasonal fairy cakes have a nice chunk of banana in the centre – but some have vegetables!

You’ll need a baking tray that holds a dozen cupcakes, paper cases and a few precooked vegetables. I used some chunks of baked squash and some broccoli florets lightly cooked until the stems were just going soft. For the rest:-

4 ounces butter

4 ounces sugar

7 ounces self raising flour

1 ounce cocoa powder

2 eggs

a few drops of vanilla essence

a couple of tablespoons of milk

a banana cut into six pieces

some chunks of cooked vegetable about the same size as the banana – I used squash and broccoli, but small Brussel sprouts would be good too!

Turn the oven on to gas mark 5 (190 C; 375 F) to preheat it, make sure there’s shelves just above and below the middle.

Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs and vanilla. Fold in the flour and cocoa, adding a bit of milk if the mixture is too stiff to work easily.

Dollop a small spoonful of mix into each cake case, spreading it to cover the bottom. Lightly press a chunk of banana into half of the cases, and a piece of vegetable into the other six. Carefully cover these fillings with the rest of the mix until they can’t be seen.

Cook on the higher shelf for 20 minutes, then move to the lower middle shelf for another 5 – 10 minutes till the cake tops are firm. There’s extra moisture in the fillings, so they take a little longer than usual. Take the cakes out of the tray and leave them to cool on a wire rack.

You might want to use colour coded paper cases to avoid ambushing yourself with a broccoli cake!

March seemed to be a busy month, though I couldn’t exactly say how. I built a new tyre garden on a derelict car park, harvesting a windfall heap of spent mushroom compost donated to the Red Brick Gardening Club. Once there’s a few dry days, I’ll paint labels for the plants and take pictures.

Gardening was the theme – the long wet winter has delayed planting as the soil here was too cold and wet. Seeds tend to rot in those conditions. A greenhouse would have been useful to me; my neighbour has one they don’t use much. The issue would be access for watering.

I gathered bags of the compost to fill up my own raised bed, made a trip to the seaside for seaweed, and finally began the planting. Leeks and broccoli are the staples; carrots grown in large pots with extra sand. The broccoli is from saved seed, but I’m still having trouble getting viable leek seed.

carrot seedlings in sand with a background of mature broccoli leaves

I’m planting Valor seed potatoes in the ground, and Stemster in tyre stacks. The peas, soaked for a few days and beginning to sprout, have been buried beside their climbing frames. I’ll buy in tomato plants and squashes this year. They need that head start to be ready by the end of summer. There’s only so much green tomato chutney a household can eat!

I’ve been out with the Resilience Handbook a few times too. Earth Hour in Chard was splendid, if bitterly cold. Chard has an interesting history; industrial rather than farming, unusual for Somerset. The Magic Oxygen Literary Prizegiving day in Lyme Regis was excellent, like a miniature Literary Festival! I gave a talk on food resilience, which went down well.

In between outdoor work and excursions, I’ve been working on my new book ‘Recipes for Resilience’, plus designing some talks and workshops. I’ll be talking at the Green Wedmore meeting tonight. I haven’t been out on an adventure for awhile now, so I’m planning a trip to the furthest south west – the Scilly Isles – promoting the Handbook and looking out for resilient recipes!

The beautiful blue or white flowers of borage are a lovely feature of the Resilience Garden. They currently add colour to the patch of seeding cress, and are very attractive to bees.

Borage is relentlessly self-seeding. Fortunately the leaves are edible and a regular cull of small plants yields plenty for this recipe. The other important ingredient is a chunk of cheap soft cheese – Brie, Camembert, goat’s cheese – which you’ve picked up on offer.

I found some Somerset Brie at the Farmers’ Market, and it was time for some selective weeding.

The Recipe

Collect a colander full of young borage leaves. Wash, lightly shred, and steam for about ten minutes until they are quite soft and merged into a pulp. Make a shortcrust pastry base and bake it blind. I’d use a small dish to try this out, about 8” across, which takes a mix of three ounces of fat to six ounces of plain flour.

Spread a layer of steamed borage across the cooked pastry base, between half and one centimetre thick. Now do your best to slice the soft cheese and cover the layer of borage with it. Settle for dotting chunks on the tart if you have a particularly resistant cheese; it will melt.

Bake it on the middle shelf of a medium oven until the cheese has melted to your satisfaction while the pastry edges remain unburnt. It takes twenty minutes or so, if you work while everything is still hot.

Adding Things

This is the basic structure of the borage cheese tart, to which you can add by foraging. For this one, I foraged a red onion from the vegetable basket and a few rashers of smoky bacon neglected by the lodger. These were finely chopped and fried up together, then stirred into the steamed borage. While in the garden, I’d found a couple of early courgettes. Thinly sliced, these made another layer on top of the borage.

We had the tart cold, with new potatoes from a tyre stack and salad leaves from the greenhouse next door; the meal fed three adults. Even the weeds in the Resilience Garden are useful!

Watching ‘The Island with Bear Grylls’, it appears that apathy caused by culture shock can lead seamlessly to exhaustion from lack of food calories. Part of a Resilience Plan is to keep a small store of tinned and dried supplies. I recommend keeping enough for three weeks, if you have the space.

Inspired to inspect my own collection, I found it was a bit haphazard and resolved to organise it. Counting calories and working out recipes…. I’ll have to write another book.

The stores have to be rotated as sell by dates are reached. Check through them every three months, take out anything that needs used before the next check, rearrange and restock. Never store food you don’t like. Storage conditions are often far from ideal; lofts suffer from stifling summer heat and freezing winters. You couldn’t store butter, for example.

If you ever need to rely on your stores, it’s useful to do some menu planning. Here’s one recipe..

Resilient Lentil Soup

A large pan. This recipe is easier to make in larger amounts. A tablespoon of cooking oil, some tamari (soy sauce). If you have any fresh meat or onion type vegetables to add, chop them up and lightly fry them.

If you are lucky, you may have some stock; otherwise add hot water and a couple of stock cubes. Add about four ounces [112g] of dried red lentils. Don’t pre-soak them.

How much liquid? Depends how many people you want to feed; this recipe is enough to fill four bowls. Remember the lentils will soak up some of it. If you have any root vegetables, put them in now. Grated carrot is nice.

Stir. Bring it to a low boil, then turn the heat right down and let it simmer. Mind it doesn’t stick; pans with thick bottoms are best for this work. Stir in four teaspoons of instant gravy mix and a quarter 130g tube of tomato puree. Keep an eye on the sticking as the soup thickens. You can add more water at any point.

Add any green leafy veg, shredded, just before the end. The soup is done when the lentils are soft, but can be kept simmering to wait for people for as long as you care to keep stirring it.

This soup really needs to be kept in a cold place to last over two meals, so it’s best made fresh and left overs eaten early the next day. Without the added fresh food, this recipe provides an unimpressive 550 calories* between four. If you’re completely unable to access any other ingredients, increase the lentils.

*all calculations are strictly back-of-the -envelope

However, what of your neighbours who don’t have stores? Remember, freezers depend on electricity. Could they help you forage to add to the meal? Bacon goes very well with this recipe; it may be available after less thoroughly preserved meats have spoiled.

A basic soup provides an expandable framework for a variety of fresh food.

You’ll find that collecting vegetables from the garden adds to the preparation time for a large meal. They need to be dug up, washed and trimmed. You can economise on effort by cooking more than you need and adding the surplus to a stew the next day.

Buy a bird or joint for a roast dinner. You can afford organic free range, as you’re going to be able to get up to twelve adult meals from under £10 worth. While it is cooking, use the oven to roast trays of potatoes, onions, parsnips, carrots and squash – whatever you have available. Keep enough room for a tray of Yorkshire puddings to go in later.

Timing is crucial. Wash all the vegetables. The meat will take longest to cook, so put it in first. Read some recipes for more exact times. After the meat has cooked for awhile, the roast potatoes are next. Put them on the shelf above the meat until they start to brown when you can move them lower. If you get fed up waiting for this to happen, you might be able to finish them off under the grill. Don’t forget they are there.

Make a Yorkshire pudding mix using one egg, two tablespoons of plain flour and four fluid ounces of milk. It needs to stand for at least half an hour before cooking. Longer is better.

Prepare the vegetables for roasting. They can go in when the potatoes are getting soft nearly to the middle. You could move the meat down a shelf now. Do use hand protection when moving hot oven shelves, always take the trays off and set them on a heat proof surface first, and be careful of hot oil.

Cut up some cauliflower, shred brassica leaves, spinach or chard ready for steaming on the hob. Take your Yorkshire pudding trays, add a teaspoon of oil in the bottom of each and put the empty tray near the top of the oven for the oil to heat up.

Check the progress of the other things in the oven. The meat should be nearly ready to take out and the vegetables almost edible. If not, this is a good time to tidy up. When everything else is up to speed, take out the trays and carefully add a couple of tablespoons of the batter mix to each. The above amounts should make six, just share it around, they don’t need to be very full. Return them to the oven, near the top. Start steaming the vegetables.

The idea is to smother everyone’s plate with vegetables so that they do not notice there is only a small piece of meat each. The Yorkshires are for filler, and if you can make a thick gravy using the juices from the roasting dish, so much the better.

Hide the rest of the meat, or otherwise ensure no-one is going for seconds or midnight raids. There should be a mixture of vegetables left over. Keep these for the next day’s cooking, when you will be making leftover stew, possibly with dumplings. If you bought a bird, you can make a stock with the carcass and use this as a base for a broth on the third day.

An expanded version of this strategy, along with recipes for vegetables, has been included in ‘Recipes for Resilience’, to be published in 2018.

This is incredibly cheap and can be put together in minutes, then left to cook while you do other things.

Use a large pan. Take a half pound (about 250 grams) of mince, preferably from your local butcher, and brown it in a little oil. A dash of soy sauce at this stage improves the colour. Add a couple of finely chopped onions, herbs and garlic.

Stir till the onion is soft, then lightly sprinkle with plain flour and stir some more. Slowly add a litre of hot water as you stir, then crumble a stock cube into the broth. Throw in a couple of handfuls of dried barley grains and simmer on a low heat for at least half an hour, stirring occasionally.

Serve with bread. This broth provides a nourishing meal for at least four people. Increase the quantities to feed more.

At this time of year you will find that your stored potatoes begin to soften and sprout. Soon they will no longer be a reliable source of carbohydrates and the resilient household will need to turn to grains.

The leeks you planted last year will be ready to use now, and can be substituted for onion in this recipe. For extra vitamins, add shreds of new brassica leaves or throw in a handful of chopped wilted rocket just before serving. Use up the last of the potatoes, carrots and parsnip over the Spring to bulk the broth up into a stew.

Dedicated survivalists can, of course, strip the meat from a lightly roasted rabbit or squirrel and make a stock from the carcass instead of using mince and hot water.